V5. This is it, I don’t know how I could improve this build. One thing, I encourage anyone who uses the Corsair SFF PSU’s to buy their sleeved cable pack, which should be the standard in the retail box.

It may very well be my last rig after 20 years of building, the way gaming laptops are coming along. If you take a Surface Book 2 and put a an adaptive 144hz panel on it, the next gen of Thunderbolt I/O, and the next gen of 10nm GPU’s, that may be it for me. I spend more than half the month traveling. Building a powerful rig is purely a frivolous hobby to satisfy the inner child that couldn’t afford high end parts.

It may very well be my last rig after 20 years of building, the way gaming laptops are coming along. If you take a Surface Book 2 and put a an adaptive 144hz panel on it, the next gen of Thunderbolt I/O, and the next gen of 10nm GPU’s, that may be it for me. I spend more than half the month traveling. Building a powerful rig is purely a frivolous hobby to satisfy the inner child that couldn’t afford high end parts.

Amen to that. My rig is an i7 Skylake with a 1080 and 32GB RAM whose primary use for about a year was playing Overwatch, which is performant on a TI-81 and Donkey Kong Bongos.

Ignoring any sort of VR stuff, 4K/120 (sustained) will likely be the plateau we sit on for the next decade, if not longer. Considering desktops can't even do this yet, I'm not holding out for a laptop replacing my main workstation.

That said, the core of current builds will likely last throughout that same time period with just a GPU swap. If I knew ~8 years ago that an overclocked i7 2600K would have maintained the longevity that it has, I probably would have ignored everything in-between except GPUs and going mITX.

The only thing I could see as an improvement on the M1 is a front panel swap to USB-C at some point down the road.

Ignoring any sort of VR stuff, 4K/120 (sustained) will likely be the plateau we sit on for the next decade, if not longer. Considering desktops can't even do this yet, I'm not holding out for a laptop replacing my main workstation.

That said, the core of current builds will likely last throughout that same time period with just a GPU swap. If I knew ~8 years ago that an overclocked i7 2600K would have maintained the longevity that it has, I probably would have ignored everything in-between except GPUs and going mITX.

The only thing I could see as an improvement on the M1 is a front panel swap to USB-C at some point down the road.

Both the brown fans are there to provide additional inwards airflow for positive case pressure, unfortunately the only place I could mount them also needed to contain the pump. If it was a DDC then that would actually be a good setup but yeah, I'm aware the D5 needs no additional cooling

At the moment the GPU is an Asus GTX 660; low enough power and with a good enough cooler that even under load, I just can't hear it over the (current) fan setup. There's no card-specific block available for my current card, so unless I want to fit a generic block for fun and games, it'll stay air-cooled. In my box, the CPU has a peak thermal output approaching twice that of the GPU, which is atypical I know.

Some point this year or next (depending what the next gen NVidia GPUs are like, and whether I decide to pick up a used 10-series card or wait for a suitable price / performance part in the 11-series) the GPU will get upgraded and at that point, I'll decide if liquid cooling it is worthwhile. I tend to keep GPUs for a while (!) so if I can swing the budget I'll aim to incorporate it into the loop.

As things stand I already have 2 ML140 fans in the R3, so buying a radiator that will use them (rather than having to buy more 120mm fans) makes sense. For sure, the system is way overkill - but I'm deliberately doing that to give me the lowest fan speeds I can get, even under load. Plus as mentioned, possible future expansion room for a future GPU upgrade.

Even now the GPU is inaudible against the minimal background noise of the pump and air moving through the rads.

I really like this board, it's a good compromise between feature rich and overloaded, no overly giddy colour schemes, overclocks reasonably well, good BIOS, etc. I did look at that EKWB part, but the price just put me off. I know it's made specifically for that motherboard and a few others, so it's not unreasonable for what it is, but my lightly used pre-owned block cost under a third of what I'd have paid for the monoblock.

Edit: if anyone can suggest a slim (ie 15mm depth) 140mm fan that's pretty quiet (and I'd be running it at 600-800 rpm so it doesn't need to be amazing, but I don't want any ticking bearings or anything) I could mount that in the usual rear fan spot and save poor Jehos and his nervous twitch.

I agree. I mean...I'm looking at rainbow RGBs which is normally blech, but somehow the whole thing works there. Well done!

Thanks! I use the “Rainbow Wave” as the default but I do have several other profiles I have linked the certain games plus I’ll switch up the theme occasionally. The iCUE software gives you a lot of customization options, even turning it all off if you want no lighting at all. The profiles are mostly for the keyboards but it’s pretty easy to adapt the colors on the other components to match the keyboard theme for a game.

Yes! So I ended up returning the 280X. As nice as it was, the temps were just too hot for my liking. Coolant temp for the H115i AIO was over 12C higher(!!) than the Meshify C Mini. So, I went back to the Meshify. GPU temps also 6C cooler with the Meshify with stock fan curves on a highly overclocked 1070 Ti.

I really enjoy the versatility of the Corsair LL Fans, the LED strips, and the iCUE software. I use some custom profiles to change the lighting based on the game I'm playing. Easy to use and to make custom lighting styles.

Here are the pics!

Here's an example of an "80's Retro" lighting scheme I found for the Corsair K70 Keyboard and I adapted the lighting for the fans, AIO, and light strips.